Working with Others – An Analysis of Collaborative Research Likelihood

Abstract

Background: While diversity and teamwork is valued increasingly in engineering education in particular and in our society in general, we intend to explore the quality and quantity of academic collaborations to understand the current state-of-art of collaborative research projects within engineering education. Purpose: Our long-term objective is to understand why collaborations occur and what makes it more likely to occur. For this work-in-progress paper, we observed the trends of collaborations within Engineering Education Research and observed whether and how collaboration behaviour changed, in measurable ways, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also observed whether three seems to be a relation between the quality of research within Engineering Education Research because of collaborations. Methodology: We explored and compared the articles published in all sections of the annual conferences of American Society of Engineering Education, Canadian Engineering Education Association, and European Society for Engineering Education from 2017 – 2022 and publications in the Journal of Engineering Education from years 2017 – 2022. Results: Our preliminary results have shown that the quality of Engineering Education research seems to improve only slightly with collaborations. Additionally, we have observed that the percentage of collaborative research projects differ in the five places that we have explored. Conclusions: The long-term goal of this research is to identify the kinds of projects that can be done collaboratively and also identify gaps in collaborative research so that other researchers can use that information to design more collaborative projects. This initial work is to estimate recent levels of collaboration using author counts.